Pirsig Link

Here is a link to the Bozeman Daily Chronicle article on MSU granting an honorary degree to Robert Pirsig

From Class

Pirsig Schedule of Events

******************************************
Final Presentations:
8 people per day,
6 minutes 25 seconds per presentation,
By last name...

Day 1:
A - G

Day 2:
H - J

Day 3:
K - O

Day 4:
P - T

Day 5:
U - Z + three person performance
ALL PRESENTATIONS ARE MANDATORY!
******************************************
No final exams!

Large Red Man Reading

The Owl in the Sarcophagus

"How do you know what you think until you see what you say?" - W. H. Auden

“The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.”

Solaripedia

From Class

House was Quiet and the World Was Calm

Large Red Man Reading

The Emperor of Ice-Cream

Lions in Sweden

Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself

The Plain Sense of Things

Landscape With Boat

Andrey Tarkovskiy:
Solaris
Stalker
Mirror
Nostalghia
The Sacrifice

Blog an amendment to a passage in Solaris "that jumps out at you".

From Class

D: Solaristics

The Evolving Study of Solaris

D: Dæmon

Solaripedia

Wallace Stevens - Concordance

Oak Leaves Are Hands

The Poem That Took The Place Of A Mountain

Primitive Like An Orb

The Planet on the Table


Ariel was glad he had written his poems
they were of a remembered time
or of something seen he liked

Other makings of the sun
were waste and welter
and the ripe shrub writhed

his self and the sun were one
and his poems, although makins of his self
were no less makings of the sun

it was not important that they be remembered
what mattered was that they should bear
some liniment or character

Their affluence, if only half-percieved
in the poverty of their writing
of the planet of which they were part

Tea at the Palaz of Hoon

Tattoo

Add this to Rhetoric

The Snow Man

Man Carrying Thing

Postcard From the Volcano

From Class

De-centering
Ec-centric (off center)
De-mythologizing

Alexandra's Friend's Cousin



Disillusionment at 10 O'Clock

Bantams in Pine-Woods

Vacancy in the Park

The Latest Freed Man

Debris of Life and Mind

On the Way to the Bus (Couldn't find it online... Sorry)

From Class

Feeling insignificant?


There is another kind of intelligence beyond the mind



4332908

"The miracle is the only thing that happens"

"Most people on this planet are taking up space ... They don't know how to live, and they don't know what to do." Sexson

From Class

Ozymandius by Shelley

From Class

Kubla Khan

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

An Ordinary Evening in New Haven

Aspirin - aprire

From Class

Participation Mystique

Choose a canto and blog on it. You don't need to understand it, you just need to engage it.

There was a Child went Forth - Walt Whitman

Merlin - "Psycho-boner"

Not Ideas About The Thing But The Thing Itself

PHAT

Credences of Summer:

Postpone the anatomy of summer, as
The physical pine, the metaphysical pine.
Let’s see the very thing and nothing else.
Let’s see it with the hottest fire of sight.
Burn everything not part of it to ash.

Trace the gold sun about the whitened sky
Without evasion by a single metaphor.
Look at it in its essential barrenness
And say, this is the centre that I seek.
Fix it in an eternal foliage

And fill the foliage with arrested peace,
Joy of such permanence, right ignorance
Of change still possible. Exile desire
For what is not. This is the barrenness
Of the fertile thing that can attain no more.

I think that I shall never see

The Poem That Took The Place Of A Mountain

The Great Mother - Eric Neumann

Ibsen - The Master Builder

From Class

The Motive For Metaphor

The Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

Man Carrying Thing

in-form

Caryophanon blog
katabasis and anabasis

Giambattista Vico (unnecessary for class, accessory)

Goethe quote
commit

Mahabharata - Bhagavad Gita

"I am All that you think. All that you say. Everything hangs on Me, like pearls on a thread. I am the Earth’s scent and the Fire’s heat. I Am appearance and disappearance. I Am the tricks that hoax. I Am the radiance of All that shines. I am Time grown ancient. All beings fall in to the night and all beings are brought back to the day light. I have already defeated all these warriors. But he who thinks he can kill and he who thinks he can be killed are both mistaken. No weapon can pierce the life-breath that is pure consciousness. No Fire can burn it. No water can drench it. No Wind can make it dry.

Have no fear and rise up because I Love you.

Now you can dominate your mysterious and incomprehensible spirit. You can see its other side. Act as you must Act. I myself Am never without Action. Rise up."

Arjuna replies: "My illusion is dissolved. My errors destroyed. By your grace now I am firm. My doubts are dispersed. I will Act according to your word."

From Class

Jerome Rothenberg

Ploughing on Sunday

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Alfred (name)

Montevideo - Capital and chief port of Uruguay

Video - Latin - videre 'to see'

The only place on the webernets that I could find Mrs. Alfred Uruguay in its entirety.

Mo Yan

Reality coming up the hill, Imagination, coming down the hill.

"figure of capable imagination" - Mrs. Alfred Uruguay - Stevens

Metaphysical - (Immaterial [no matter])

Physical - (Material)

muck and mire

Lucretius

Kenosis

Large Red Man Reading

From Class

Stevens and Weil - Decreation

"To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go be a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not." - T.S. Eliot

nostos |ˈnästōs|noun ( pl. nostoi |-ˌtoi| ) literarya homecoming.ORIGIN Greek.          nostalgia

D. Theosophy

We shall not cease from explorationAnd the end of all our exploringWill be to arrive where we startedAnd know the place for the first time.

- T.S. Eliot


Time to generate your project!

D. Neti neti
       "not this, not that"

D. Tat Tvam Asi

D. Veda

D. Perennial Philosophy

"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thru' narrow chinks of his cavern." - William Blake

Of Modern Poetry

Landscape with Boat

"Whether you like it or not, it's true. You're part of me and I'm part of you" - Sexson

The Poem Must Resist the Intelligence Almost Successfully - Stevens

Asides on the Oboe - Stevens

Solaris

I finished Solaris today. I wish I weren't so tired because I would love to post a long-winded glorification of the novel. Unfortunately I'm beat. I will say that this novel is hauntingly beautiful. I haven't had to reach for my dictionary so many times throughout a read since... well, ever. If you haven't read it, you're in for a treat, if you have, Event Horizon? Not exactly the same but, thrilling and ghastly in kind if you follow. But blast! It's post 1am!
Sleep sweet Sexsonites!

Location:Lloyd St,Bozeman,United States

From Class

Technology of the Heart

Landscape with a Boat

Blog on what interests you. (Respond to a poem that grabs you.)
Consume your fly!

Work                            Imagination___|___|___|___|___|___|___Reality
               with the poem.

3 WORDS: "TAT TVAM ASI" - "That thou art," "Thou art that," or "That you are," or, according to Dr. S. "You're it"

I Heard a Fly Buzz

Not Ideas About the Thing, But the Thing Itself

Decreation

Do people change?

Ralph Waldo Emerson - "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." and English Professors. - Sexson

"The real is only the base. But it is the base." - Stevens

"I wish that I might be a thinking stone" - Stevens

From Class

Wallace Stevens Adagia

Choose 2 and write about them!

Blog about your accessory readings.

Vanity

Sonnet 73

Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent's Narrow Room

Study of Two pears

From Class

Stevens - Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself

poesis

Stevens - Connoisseur's of Chaos

"If Wallace Stevens is the King of Things, he is the Thing King" - Sexson

On the Nature of Things



THE POEMS OF OUR CLIMATE

I
Clear water in a brilliant bowl,
Pink and white carnations. The light
In the room more like a snowy air,
Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow
At the end of winter when afternoons return.
Pink and white carnations - one desires
So much more than that. The day itself
Is simplified: a bowl of white,
Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,
With nothing more than the carnations there.

II
Say even that this complete simplicity
Stripped one of all one's torments, concealed
The evilly compounded, vital I
And made it fresh in a world of white,
A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,
Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than a world of white and snowy scents.

III
There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

Life is Motion

From Class

Earth Song

Musica universalis

D: Paramour

par·a·mour1.2.

   [par-uh-moor]  Show IPA

noun

an illicit lover, especially of a married person.

any lover.

Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself

The Man With The Blue Guitar
One
The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."
The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."
And they said to him, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar,
Of things exactly as they are."
Two
I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can.
I sing a hero's head, large eye
And bearded bronze, but not a man,
Although I patch him as I can
And reach through him almost to man.
If a serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,
Say that it is the serenade
Of a man that plays a blue guitar.
Three
A tune beyond us as we are,
Yet nothing changed by the blue guitar;
Ourselves in tune as if in space,
Yet nothing changed, except the place
Of things as they are and only the place
As you play them on the blue guitar,
Placed, so, beyond the compass of change,
Perceived in a final atmosphere;
For a moment final, in the way
The thinking of art seems final when
The thinking of god is smoky dew.
The tune is space. The blue guitar
Becomes the place of things as they are,
A composing of senses of the guitar.
Four
Tom-tom c'est moi. The blue guitar
And I are one. The orchestra
Fills the high hall with shuffling men
High as the hall. The whirling noise
Of a multitude dwindles, all said,
To his breath that lies awake at night.
I know that timid breathing. Where
Do I begin and end? And where,
As I strum the thing, do I pick up
That which momentarily declares
Itself not to be I and yet
Must be. It could be nothing else.

Gotye - Eyes Wide Open

From Class

mise en abyme - "placed into abyss"
     infinity?

Stand between two mirrors.
     Get lost in yourself

"Believe without belief, beyond belief." - Stevens

Respond to somebody else's blog in your blog!

"Incantation"

Memorize the entirety of "The Idea of Order at Key West"

"Your (final) project should communicate to us that you have made a discovery... It should make you go 'Oh!' or 'Ah!'" - Dr. Sexson

Themes in TIoOaKW?

Literary Criticism - The Mirror and the Lamp by M. H. Abrams

"The Man With the Blue Guitar" - Stevens


Four items in every work of art:
1) The work itself. (New Criticism)
2) The artist.
3) What the art is about.
4) The audience.

Stevens gives us two forms of literary criticism in TIoOaKW.

D: Mimesis
     "imitation"
     "mimic" in TIoOaKW

Plato -
Pen (as a work of art):

Representation of facsimile

Plato's theory of eternal form

D: Poiesis
     "creation"

Kenosis versus pleurosis (pleroma?)

HW: Open up your Stevens book at random and answer the question "What am I reading about?", the real subject matter. Poetry itself.

From Class

1Q84

"How do you know what you think until you see what you say?" - Sexson

Joseph Anton: A Memoir - Rushdie

The Idea of Order at Key West

From Class

Farewell to Florida

Friar Barron's commentary on The Swerve

Quotation by Wallace Stevens

Ode on a Grecian Urn
     "...Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/Are sweeter..."

The Idea of Order at Key West

Four items in every work of art:
1) The work itself.
2) The artist.
3) What the art is about.
4) The audience.

From Class

"In an age of disbelief, or, what is the same thing, in a time that is largely humanistic, in one sense or another, it is for the poet to supply the satisfactions of belief, in his measure and in his style... I think of it as a role of the utmost seriousness. It is, for one thing, a spiritual role... To see the gods dispelled in mid-air and dissolve like clouds is one of the great human experiences... It was as if they had never inhabited the earth. There was no crying out for their return. They were not forgotten because they had been part of the glory of the earth." (Stevens)

Walter Ong - Orality and Literacy

Stevens - Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

From Class

The full video with Susan Howe saying she wants our class Bible buried with her:

The Emperor of Ice Cream

Hemmingway – A Clean Well Lighted Place
     (Just for fun.)

Alexander Calder creations:

Read Dusty's Blog

Sunday Morning

Angels and Devils:

Backstories due on your blog by Monday!

From Class

Stevens Sked Final 2

Memorize assigned poem

"There words are chosen out of their desire" - from A Primitive Like an Orb - Wallace Stevens

List of quotes Dr. Sexson recited to his granddaughter:

• A Valediction Forbidding Mourning
• The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
• The Snow Man

Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage

Study of Two Pears

A Postcard From The Volcano

The Motive for Metaphor

In a Station of the Metro

Greenblatt - Highlights from Chapter 8.

• Everything is made of invisible particles.
• "... the ceaseless mutation of forms composed of indestructible substances–'the greatest thought that mankind has ever hit upon.'"
• The elementary particles are infinite in number but limited in shape and size.
• All particles are in motion in an infinite void.
• The universe has no creator or designer.
• Everything comes into being as a result of a swerve.
• "...declinatio, inclinatio, or clinamen–is only the most minimal of motions, nec plus quam minimum."
• "...declination, inclination, or slope–is only the most minimal of motions, no more than the least." (Google Translate)
• The swerve is the source of free will.
• Nature ceaselessly experiments.
• The universe was not created for or about humans.
• Human society began not in a Golden Age of tranquility and plenty, but in a primitive battle for survival.
• The soul dies.
• There is no afterlife.
• Death is nothing to us.
• All organized religions are superstitious delusions.
• Religions are invariably cruel.
• There are no angels, demons, or ghosts.
• The highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain.
• The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion.
• Understanding the nature of things generates deep wonder.

From Class

"A Postcard From The Volcano"

Here is a good example of an "unpacking."
     Do this with "A Postcard From The Volcano"

Beware of some of James's notes. They may be personal and not necessarily class assignments. Though perhaps good for personal mental exercise.

"Domination of Black"
Children's poem? Really?

"Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock"
 Google: Catching Tigers in Red Weather

"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"
Inflection and/or Innuendo

"Sunday Morning"

From Class

To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a [236/237] stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch. What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of  Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own. Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us. "Philosophy is the microscope of thought." The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, [237/238] or of what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us.

One of the most beautiful passages of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of the Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of the literary sense. An undefinable taint of death had clung always about him, and now in early manhood he believed himself smitten by mortal disease. He asked himself how he might make as much as possible of the interval that remained; and he was not biassed by anything in his previous life when he decided that it must be by intellectual excitement, which he found just then in the clear, fresh writings of Voltaire. Well! we are all condamnés, as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve — les hommes sont tous condamnés mort avec des sursis indéfinis: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among "the children of this world," in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion — that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. [238/239] Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.

 - Conclusion

The Red Wheelbarrow

William Carlos Williams

---

so much depends
upona red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.

SONNET 73 - Shakespeare

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.
   This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,

   To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Anecdote of the Jar

Wallace Stevens

---

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Ode on a Grecian Urn

The Idea of Order at Key West

Poems in Harmonium to know:
1) Domination of Black
2) Snowman
3) A High-Toned Old Christian Woman
4) The Emperor of Ice-Cream
5) Disillusionment of Ten O'clock
6) Anecdote of the Jar
7) Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
8) Sunday Morning

Class stuff:

Participation Mystique

Polymorphous Perverseity, Infantile Sexuality

Kubla Khan

The Idea of Order at Key West

From Class

Earthy Anecdote

by Wallace Stevens

Every time the bucks went clattering
Over Oklahoma
A firecat bristled in the way.

Wherever they went,
They went clattering,
Until they swerved
In a swift, circular line
To the right,
Because of the firecat.

Or until they swerved
In a swift, circular line
To the left,
Because of the firecat.

The bucks clattered.
The firecat went leaping,
To the right, to the left,
And
Bristled in the way.

Later, the firecat closed his bright eyes
And slept.



Anecdote of the Jar

Wallace Stevens

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Three Philosophical Poets by George Santayana

The Snowman

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

On the Nature of Things

On the Nature of Things

A link for you to view the Project Gutenberg website with the entire text online. For download options click on THIS.

First Post!

Rio Gonzalez
406-624-9746
riowaitforit@riogonzalez.com